Selecting first descendant text node

Hello,

how do I select the first descendant text node of an element?

My XML:

..
  <item numbertext="1. ">
    <par>
      <italic>first text</italic>
    </par>
    <par>next text</par>
  </item>
..


The stylesheet should put the numbertext attribute value before the first
textnode of the contents of the <item> element, i.e. expected result
should be:

..
  <item>
    <par>
      <italic>1. first text</italic>
    </par>
    <par>next text</par>
  </item>
..


First try:

..
<xsl:template match="item//text()[1]">
    <xsl:value-of select="ancestor::item/attribute::numberingtext" />
    <xsl:value-of select="." />
</xsl:template>
..

This does not work since it matches both text nodes, since ...text()[1]
matches only for first child of its immediate parent, which is true for
both text nodes.


Second try:

..
<xsl:template match="(item//text())[1]">
    <xsl:value-of select="ancestor::item/attribute::numberingtext" />
    <xsl:value-of select="." />
</xsl:template>
..

This does not work since the XSLT processor complains of illegal tokens
"item", "/", etc. after the first opening bracket in the match expression.

So, how do I select the first (in document order) of all of the
descendant text nodes of an element?

I was using Xalan 2.1.0 for the test.

Regards, Christian.


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